An ant colony metaheuristic approach for optimal reliability assessment of software systems incorporating redundancy

With the all pervasive presence of computers to all aspects of life, software reliability assessment is assuming a position of utmost importance. Moreover many commercial and governmental software systems require high mission reliability requiring both hardware and the software to be very reliable. Software reliability is acknowledged to perk up with the amount of testing efforts invested, which in turn reduces the cost of software development and in turn system cost. The scale of redundancy employed affects reliability favorably, while increasing the cost of software design and development. This paper employs an ant colony meta-heuristic optimization method to solve the redundancy allocation problem (RAP) for software systems. Herein, an ant colony optimization algorithm for the software RAP (SRAP) is devised and tested on a computer relay software that is employed for fault handling in power system transmission lines and the results presented validates the efficacy of the approach.